Declaration of license switch for SoftEther VPN from GPLv2 to Apache License 2.0

The Development Board of the SoftEther VPN project hereby presents this declaration of license switch from GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) to Apache License version 2.0. The change of the license takes effect immediately after this Declaration is published.

We’d like to express our sincere gratitude and appreciation to all contributors who agreed to this license switch.

We believe that switching the license of SoftEther VPN to Apache License 2.0 would make SoftEther VPN more suitable for various applications (e.g. hardware manufacturers). This would be beneficial for all the people who are (and will be) using SoftEther VPN for a wide range of purposes.

SoftEther VPN has been open-source under the GPLv2 license since January 2014. The proposal to switch the software license to Apache License (or any other BSD-like license) was presented to the community on April 25th, 2018 on GitHub*.

After we received overwhelmingly positive opinions, the board members have attempted to obtain agreement from each of the source code contributors, excluding who contributed with minor changes which are not regarded as copyrighted work. At last we obtained the license change approval by all of the source code contributors.

Therefore the Development Board decided to change the license to Apache License 2.0, publish this Declaration, and modify all of the copyright notices in the software code.